Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  Lincoln’s mayor, Bennett Martin, told television reporters the triple murder was “the most terrible thing that’s ever happened in Lincoln”—apparently forgetting the triple murder of the Bartletts reported just one day earlier. He offered a five-hundred-dollar reward for information leading to Starkweather’s arrest. Clearly, the game had changed. No longer were the murder victims slum-dwellers or rural teens. Starkweather had struck out at the city’s powerful, a couple who seemed to symbolize the nation’s aspirations.

  The Ward killings unleashed the era’s ready reserve of Cold War anxiety. People were especially on edge in January 1958: three months earlier, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, sparking panic that communists were winning the arms race. The Soviets’ beeping sphere provoked national hand-wringing over whether America, blinded by materialism, had gone soft. “It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we will put a better satellite in the air,” declared Senate minority leader Lyndon Johnson. “Perhaps it will even have chrome trim and automatic windshield wipers.” The nation’s panic escalated when the administration rushed a U.S. satellite project into testing. The American satellite exploded just above the launching pad in December.

  Pictures of National Guardsmen patrolling the streets of Lincoln evoked the fear of a Soviet invasion. The Washington Post promptly labeled the crime spree a “chain-reaction of death.” But images of armed guards escorting children to and from school also echoed the pictures that had recently been coming out of Little Rock, where President Eisenhower had sent the 101st Airborne to enforce a desegregation order against defiant Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. Communists in space, black students in Southern schools: the nation was tightly wound, expecting at any moment to have to take up arms to defend what it saw as its way of life. Whether the national menace turned out to be Russian nukes, nine black high school students, or two teenagers with shotguns, it would be fought. The irony was that, just as Lincoln woke up to the threat of Starkweather, Starkweather was finally gone.

  • • • • •

  In On the Road, published in 1957, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty drive a rich man’s Cadillac east all night across Nebraska’s Highway 30. After the murders at the Ward home, Starkweather and Fugate finally got on the road, reversing the beatniks’ trajectory, fleeing west across Nebraska’s plains. They were headed to Washington, where Charles’s older brother was a chef. They drove all night, taking Highway 34 to Grand Island, where they picked up State Route 2, a lonely highway cutting diagonally through the widely spaced towns of Nebraska’s barren Sand Hills.

  It was the farthest either of them had ever been from home. When asked about their journey in his prison statements, Charles repeatedly asked for a map so he could show the police and lawyers where he went, like an excited vacationer back from his first trip abroad. He recounted details for them: he got gas in Grand Island; around Mullen he nearly ran off the road and had to stop and sleep. They drove through Broken Bow, Dunning, and Alliance: Caril circled the towns in pencil on their map. At Crawford they switched to Highway 20. At Fort Robinson, they bought nine bottles of soda pop, before taking, as Charles recalled, “all those winding roads through the mountains.”

  Charles gave such a complete account of their flight that when I visited Lincoln, I was able to follow the pair’s exact route. The Sand Hills appear to have changed little; if anything, they probably have fewer people now than they did then. State Route 2 rolls through one tiny, near-defunct town after another, paralleling the train track, down which coal trains from Wyoming rumble at regular ten-minute intervals. Between the current two-lane highway and the train track sits the old SR 2, abandoned and crumbling away, probably the very road Starkweather drove on. Highway 20 has been straightened quite a bit since the fifties, so that as Nebraska gives way to Wyoming, you aren’t driving on “winding roads through the mountains.” In fact, you aren’t driving through mountains at all. The ridges outside Fort Robinson are the rather undramatic escarpment that marks the northern edge of the High Plains. It looks nothing like the Rockies, or the Cascades, where Charles and Caril were supposedly heading. It doesn’t even look like the Poconos. But to a couple kids who’d grown up in flat-as-a-pancake Lincoln, the pine-covered ridges must have seemed mountainous indeed.

  It was morning when the pair crossed the Wyoming state line. As they neared the small town of Douglas, they heard on the radio that the Wards had been found, and an alert had gone out on the Packard. Charles decided it was time to get a new car. West of Douglas on Highway 87, near a place called Ayers Natural Bridge, he saw a Buick parked by the side of the road. Merle Collison, a traveling shoe salesman from Montana, was asleep in the front seat.

  An oil company lease agent named Joe Sprinkle drove by a few minutes later. He saw the Packard and the Buick by the side of the road, and thinking there had been an accident, he pulled over. As he approached the Buick, he saw a girl crying in the backseat. A young man got out of the driver’s side. Sprinkle asked if he could help. Starkweather pointed a rifle at him and told him, “Help me release the emergency brake or I’ll kill you.” Charles had shot Collison through the driver’s side window, then found he couldn’t release the hand brake. For a hot-rodder, he didn’t have much luck with cars.

  Upon seeing the dead man in the Buick’s front seat, Sprinkle decided to take matters in hand. He grabbed Charles’s gun, and the two of them began to wrestle for it. That’s when deputy sheriff William Romer drove by. As soon as he stopped, Caril jumped out of the Buick and ran toward the police car, screaming for help. The sheriff later testified that she told him she had been held hostage and that Starkweather “was going to take me to Washington and kill me.” She also told the sheriff that she had seen all nine murders in Nebraska.

  As soon as the sheriff arrived, Charles ran to the Packard and took off, going east toward Douglas. Romer radioed for assistance. Before long, the Packard was being pursued by Douglas chief of police Robert Ainslie and county sheriff Earl Heflin. They chased Starkweather into Douglas, where he lost time maneuvering through traffic on the town’s main street. Continuing east out of town, Ainslie drove and Heflin fired at the Packard’s tires as it raced toward Nebraska. Finally he landed a shot in the rear window. Glass exploded into the car, and a shard hit Charles near the ear. Thinking he’d been shot, he stopped the Packard in the middle of the road and gave up quietly. In a widely repeated comment, Sheriff Heflin sneered: “He thought he was bleeding to death. That’s the kind of yellow SOB he is.”

  Newspapers gleefully jumped on the bandwagon, now cutting the captive Starkweather down to size. He was rarely mentioned without a diminutive adjective: “runty,” “bantamweight,” “pint-sized.” Editors at the venerable voice of Midwestern conservatism, the Chicago Tribune, stuffed as much invective as they could into a single headline: “ ‘Mad Dog’ Swaggering No Good to Kin; Bowlegged, Pigeontoed.”

  Charles and Caril quickly signed papers allowing them to be extradited back to Nebraska. Both of them were afraid to fly, so Nebraska police drove to Wyoming to get them. On the way home, Starkweather told Lincoln sheriff Merle Karnopp: “I always wanted to be a criminal but not this big a one.” The letter he wrote to his parents from the Wyoming jail had less swagger: “ism sorry for what i did in a lot of ways cause i know i hurt everybody, and you and mon did all you could to rise me up right,” he wrote. “But dad i’m not sorry for what i did cause for the first time me and Caril have more fun, she help me a lot, but if she comes back don’t hate her she had not a thing to do with the Killing all we wanted to do is get out of town.”

  • • • • •

  The thrilling capture of a dreaded fugitive made headlines across the nation. The following week, Life, Time, and Newsweek all ran photo spreads on the killings. Starkweather’s capture shared top billing with the successful launch, on January 31, of Explorer, America’s first satellite.

  The newspapers and magazines breathlessly reporting on Starkweather and Fuga
te were also offering up a vision of the nation’s interstate highways. The “greatest construction job in history,” Caterpillar ads declared, was underway. The company ran ads in Time and Newsweek offering readers a free booklet showing “all the routes of the magnificent Interstate-Defense System.” Among articles describing Starkweather’s “souped-up” Ford, his obsession with “hot rods,” and his mad flight down America’s highways, the Portland Cement Association declared that “concrete is preferred for the 41,000-mile Interstate System.” The Asphalt Institute was pushing a booklet called “The Better Way to Better Roads,” urging Americans to “See that your Interstate Highways are paved the heavy-duty ASPHALT way.” Nebraska newspapers also reported that the Labor Department had set wage rates for interstate construction at an average of sixty cents an hour more than those set by the Nebraska Highway Department. Governor Anderson was refusing to comply.

  The nation’s response to Starkweather was practically a referendum on automobility and all that it implied. It surfaced all the concerns—mobility, community breakdown, a rootless and restless generation—that kept the nation fearful for its future. The fear was focused on America’s youth, but people knew kids weren’t the only ones to blame. The Lincoln Star ran a series on the problem of delinquency. “Could these crimes have been prevented?” asked reporter Nancy Benjamin. “Are we, as a community, facing up to the problem of juvenile delinquency?” The overarching issue, the series concluded, was a breakdown of community. Charles Starkweather was the direct result of Lincoln becoming a “big city,” part of the asphalt jungle.

  Across the nation, people scrutinized society for what went wrong. “The Starkweather case is another grim reminder of America’s need to make a more intelligent effort to solve its social problems,” a reader from Bethesda, Maryland, wrote to the Washington Post. “Atomic destruction is not the only threat we face. Within our own society there are sicknesses and weaknesses that should be diagnosed and cured at an early stage.” The writer concluded that the nation’s values were lopsided: “The sight of the uselessly large and elaborate cars on our roads often makes me think: The things are getting better; the people are getting worse.”

  Helen Starkweather also saw her son in the context of the nation’s struggles. At his trial she testified that she had raised “six problems and one catastrophe.” Later, she regretted the remark, and dictated an open letter to the Lincoln Star. “I did not mean that I had raised six problems in the definition the dictionary gives to the word ‘problem,’ ” she insisted in a letter that shares her son’s difficulty with words.

  What I meant was, I had problems to be met. Every mother and father has. . . . At the pace this old world is set today, one cannot deny there are numerous problems that children and youth find hard to cope with. What with the atomic bomb, the speed of our planes being faster than sound, Sputnik, and our world is coming to, so we should see what our young folks are up against.

  As his trial proceeded, Charles did little to help himself. He snoozed, acted defiant, and refused to play along with his attorneys’ insanity defense. He was hostile toward his lawyers and friendly to the prosecutors, who presented him as the cold-hearted killer he’d decided he wanted to be. In May 1958, after two weeks of testimony, a jury took less than a day to convict Charles Starkweather of murder in the first degree for the killing of Robert Jensen. The recommended sentence was death. Some sources report that Guy Starkweather remarked, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Others report that he told his wife and his son Rodney, “We ought to go someplace and eat a big, fat steak.”

  In October, three months after her fifteenth birthday, Caril Fugate went on trial for murder. To the delight of the media, Charles Starkweather took the stand to testify against her. Caril rested a hand on her attorney’s arm as Charles told the court that his previous statements exonerating her had been “hogwash.” Under oath he declared that she had never been tied up or bound, that she had passed up frequent opportunities to escape. She had been in the room when he killed her family, had watched TV while he stuffed her dead mother down the privy, had held a gun on Robert Jensen and taken the money from his wallet. She had argued against giving themselves up, and at one point had even suggested they kill the café workers at Tate’s service station, because their hamburgers tasted “like dog meat.” Her lawyer put Caril on the stand to try to limit the damage, but it did the opposite: she was a bad witness, icy and often hostile or confused by questioning. In November 1958, after one day of debate, the jury convicted her of first-degree murder, recommending a sentence of life in prison. The teenager broke down and sobbed when the verdict was read.

  “I always wanted to be a criminal, but not this big a one.” Lincoln looks on as Charles goes into the courthouse one last time, to be sentenced to death. Courtesy of the Lincoln Journal Star.

  In March 1959, Sunday newspapers across the nation carried a Parade magazine with a cover proclaiming: “Mass Murderer Charles Starkweather Writes His Own Story.” The story—heavily corrected and edited from his actual text—is a string of clichés slathered with Starkweather’s unstinting self-pity. It recounts his normal home life, his abuse at the hands of vicious kindergarten bullies, and his continued suffering as an adolescent (he gave everyone in the class valentines, but not everyone gave one to him). It winds up with a rote statement of regret—“Today, my feelings are of great sorrow and remorse for the people I killed. . . . I pray that God will be forgiving of what has been done”—and a homily aimed at youth: “I would tell them to go to school, to go to Sunday school, to go to church . . . to obey their parents and guardians, and stay away from bad influences, and never undertake anything that you don’t understand.”

  America had undertaken something it didn’t understand, but there was no stopping it. The nation was being remade in the name of automobility and the limitless economic growth it promised. Charles Starkweather’s violent acting out suggested the disconnection that was the dark side of mobility, and how it might play out for the frustrated and voiceless minority left out of the promised boom. But the nation was in love with movement. It was in love with Elvis Presley’s swinging suits and hangdog hair, and with the speed lines and raked tailfins of its cars. It was in love with its new Boeing 707 passenger jets and the rockets that launched its satellites. And it was in love with its interstate highways, roads like I-80, which Lauer Ward helped launch in Nebraska, a ribbon of Portland Cement that would eventually bypass all those small towns that Caril Ann Fugate circled on the map as she and Charles Starkweather passed through, headed toward some dimly imagined Utopia of their own.

  • • • • •

  In a string of appeals for new trials and clemency, Starkweather managed to delay his execution several times. In May 1959, he found an unlikely ally in the fight: Caril Ann Fugate, who hoped he would aid her appeal by recanting his testimony against her. On May 21, with Starkweather scheduled for execution the next day, she wrote a desperate letter to President Eisenhower begging for the stay of execution that the new Nebraska governor would not grant Charles.

  “I have been denied by Governor Brooks a request to see him,” she wrote, “and see if he will tell the truth in front of a minister or someone else who would be fair before he is executed.” The president declined to get involved. “The Starkweather case,” wrote his special counsel, “is entirely a state matter.” Fugate would serve eighteen years of her life sentence, until its commutation allowed her parole in 1976. She moved to Michigan, got a job, and occasionally launched attempts to exonerate herself.

  Charles Starkweather maintained his attitude of wounded self-pity to the end. Asked if he regretted throwing his life away, he replied, “I throwed away nothin’ cause I didn’t have nothin’.” And on the eve of his execution, when prison officials asked him if he wanted to donate his eyes to an eye bank, he snapped, “Why should I? Nobody ever gave me anything.”

  On the evening of June 24, 1959, gangs of Bennet teens cruised past the Lincoln
prison and idled on the road outside, blasting their car radios and sitting on their hoods. Inside, Charles Starkweather, wearing jeans and a chambray shirt, swaggering like Dean to the last, was strapped into the electric chair at 12:05 a.m. and issued three charges of 2,200 volts each. The headlines were somber. “Mass Killer Goes to Chair in Nebraska,” read the Chicago Tribune. “Murderer of 11 Goes Calmly to His Death,” declared the Los Angeles Times. In the New York Times he was “slayer of 11,” in the Washington Post, “Killer of 11.” No one called him bantamweight, pint-sized, runty, or even a youth. After eleven deaths, it was the twelfth—his own—that finally made a man of him.

  The nation continued building its roads. Very soon, battles would begin over them. But it was all celebration, five months after Starkweather’s death, when the first segment of Nebraska’s I-80—6.4 miles near Gretna, with overpasses built by Capital Bridge—opened to traffic.

  Americans are living in the midst of a miracle. A giant nationwide engineering project—the Interstate Highway System—is altering and circumventing geography on an unprecedented scale.

  —NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, 1968

  As the Woodstock generation, female no less than male, has taken to the nation’s roads, armed mostly with trust and innocence and a desire to get somewhere else, the old order of highway violence has been stood on its head.

  —NEWSWEEK, 1973

  “Without pressing too hard, and doing a few loopy-loops around freeways and bypasses, I managed to think up some method for following through with this act,” Ed Kemper told police of his first highway murders. Here are his hunting grounds: the newly built Ashby Avenue on-ramp on I-80 in Berkeley, where he picked up hitchhikers Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Photo by Kemper’s employer, the California Division of Highways. Courtesy National Archives (406G-2-13-65-367).